Peeking into the rock

No, I haven't been to the physical therapist yet, I'm waiting for my Covered California insurance to kick in. But I decided to do a little research on statin-induced myopathy and I have found a trove of scientific articles written for physical therapists in a journal called Physical Therapy (PTJ). These articles are available in full online. No pay wall, no membership requirement. You only need to know what to search for. This is so different from other things I have tried to search for in the past. Also,at least to a cursory glance, there seem to be more women authors in this journal. More than half, even.

I have no special news to report except that statin damage does seem to be reversible so that the pain and weakness I still have is either not from that (and some of it is definitely from osteoarthritis) or will recede as I exercise more and lose some more weight. I have learned a lot more about the chemistry and genetics of the situation, but it's not stuff I can articulate, since the articles I have been reading are at the edge of what I can follow.

Here is one of the articles I read.

And here is an older one.

On another, tangentially-related front, it appears my old dog needs anti-inflammatories as a regular thing now too. She started them for an apparent muscle injury in her shoulder -- not on the side with the deformed leg -- and after she seemed to have been better for a long time I took her off them. Two days later she developed a limp again and starfted acting sad and tentative too. So I put her back on: a day later and she was racing around, playing with toys, and trying to instigate rough play at the dog park. So I'll be talking to the vet as soon as I can and getting that set up as a permanent regime. She'll be twelve in two days, which is getting up there for a 55-pound dog. I think biologically we are about the same age, really.

Further tangent: earlier this week, my father would have been eighty-five. I went to search a picture for you, and google autocorrected my search for Luis Kemnitzer to Luis Camnitzer. It is amusing that there should be another old guy out there with such a similar name, but google should not have autocorrected my search when the name I am searching is my very own last name. Don't tell me google doesn't know who's searching. I wouldn't mind the "did you mean . . ." suggestion, but autocorrect is the opposite of useful. I did send them feedback. So should ytou, everytime google autocorrects. It's the only possible way to get them to stop it.

Well, here's my father and my stepmother a long time ago, when they posed for the "hotties of harm reduction" calendar. It's in Jim Haber's photostream, and he has all rights reserved, which I believe is a bit odd considering everything.

Look at what Pervez Musharraf's been doing in Pakistan:

Getting the rape laws out of the hands of the mullahs.

There's a long ways to go yet, but this law says that rape is now a regular crime, which can be prosecuted on the basis of regular forensic evidence and no longer needs four adult Muslim men to attest to it, and which can no longer get a woman arrested for adultery. Yes, formerly, if a woman was raped and did not have four adult Muslim men to witness to it, she would be charged with adultery, which is still a crime in Pakistan which can result in a five year prison sentence or a fine. Also, the age of consent has been moved from "puberty" to sixteen for girls (I don't know about boys).

Some people I admire greatly see age of consent laws as being generally about controlling and oppressing youth, but I disagree: they are two-sided things, and are sometimes about keeping young people from being used by the adults in their lives, when there are insufficient other inhibitions. In a society where adult men have so much power over women, it's a good thing to say "Yeah, but you may not have sex with them or force them to marry when they are twelve years old." Not much of a thing, but a good one.

Back to Musharraf and Pakistan. So, to begin with, he's a dictator, and that's no good. And he's willing to have a war by proxy with India which allows thousands of Kashmiris, and other folks too, to be killed in bombings and riots. And he's willing to tolerate a whole soup of reactionary schools and camps on his border, so long as their activities are primarily focussed on Afghanistan. And he does what dictators do to stay in power. And he cut a deal with the US to not get bombed to rubble, which involved helping bomb Afghanistan to rubble. And so on.

But here he is, triumphant that he's pushed the emancipation of Pakistani women that one bit farther.

On another front, I'm going to yet another memorial for my father tonight. The good thing is that he's sharing it with another anthropologist who died this year and it's at the American Anthropological Association meeting tonight. On the other hand, it's organized by our friend Tressa, who is overly dramatic and I fear long-windedness and I expect to cry a lot. The day before yesterday was his birthday.

Complicated.

I cannot send these links to my father, who would react like I did -- I was screaming in laughter. But the weird thing? These menus are completely serious. I searched all around the site and it's true. This guy has not a shred of humor about what he's doing here. Any further comment on this would be overkill. Except that it comes from the Particles sidenar at Making Light.

On a related front, you know that John Brown story I've been working on? It's really difficult but I swear I will get it done by the deadline. I have a week. Anyway, while we were trundling around the Bay Area Tuesday to celebrate Frank and Emma's birthday, we were talking about it and it suddenly hit me just what I was writing:

--- an old man, with a long beard and strong principles about freedom, justice and equality, lies dying, while his young friends gather round him to care for him, to talk philosophy and politics with him, and go off at intervals to make revolution

For the sake of the anthology I've been trying to make him Osama bin Laden but in my heart John Brown is my father.

Which is only one reason it's hard to write.

The "update journal" box is doing something very strange right now. Every new word appears on the line below the sentence it belongs to and jumps up to the proper line after I hit the space bar and type the first letter of the next word. It's really disconcerting. Especially at the end of paragraphs, where it doesn't jumnp into place until after I hit the return key. And if I backspace the word jumps back down to its own line. This has never happened to me before. I can only hope it doesn't affect the final appearance of the post.

Here's what the Chronicle printed. There are errors, of course: he did not grow up as one of five, but as one of two, and actually spent the latter half of his adolescence on his own, as his mother had died and his father was off in England preparing to have the second clutch. Paul's in the second clutch, not the first clutch, as long as we're going for factual accuracy. And "soon disillusioned" does not describe my father's relationship with the Party, which lasted about ten years, and ended amicably. Yes, he was disillusioned, but not in the way people usually mean that word: he was inspired by his experiences with the Party to seek more communist ways of doing and being: and that is what anarchism was to him. "Primitive communism," more or less. He kept his Marxism and went forward, not back, from it (I say this as disagreed with him on various topics). Usually "soon disillusioned" is used to describe a person who pulls back from the Left and becomes a Derchowitz or something.

And Rosemary is in there, though she's not where she belongs.

And the son-in-law? That's the nice fellow. I imagine some people are going to wish that the quotes included certain other people, but that's the way it goes.

Just around midnight, my father completed his dying. He was surrounded by women who were dear to him: Brandi Apana, Moher Downing, Rosemary Prem, Janie Kesselman and myself -- and his grandson Frank Trollman who had, with Rosemary, been the backbone of his care since the beginning of the year.

We're working on the obituary now. It gets longer with every pass. I've stepped out to have Moher and Janie work on the part about his life with Moher.

Every story brings another story. I have to expand on: Sleeping Jesus, Taniga (tripe), and the ROTC.

If you happen to be one of Luis' friends and find this, here are the upcoming details:

Tomorrow, Saturday, Feb 18, 3:00 p.m.: wake at Moher's house, 97 Miguel, San Francisco.

Sunday, February 26, 2:00 p.m, memorial: Martin de Porres, 225 Potrero, San Francisco.

If you want to donate in his name, Martin's is the way to go.

I'm in the City. My father is in ICU with septic shock from pneumonia. The emergency room doctor recommended that if we wanted to be sure to "say whatever we wanted to say to him" we should come on up last night. He seemed to be stabilizing, maybe, when we left the hospital last night, but they're giving him two units this morning.

My brother is relentlessly optimistic. I'm dubious.

I want him to be right.

It did not look good last night. He was somnolent, a little confused (he seemed much more confused than he was because he was so somnolent and weak), and could only eat three bites of soup.

He's had a week and a half of radiation.

Is this what we're supposed to expect?

Where can I read about this?

So Gloria has shown signifigant deterioration in the last couple of weeks. We're sure that she's having those little strokes all the time -- she has these headaches, she becomes less coherent, she feels bad, she lies down. Yesterday she was frantic all morning to get things done -- mopping the floor, which has been the job of the weekly housecleaner forever, and various other strange little tasks. And we were talking past each other all day.

I went googling for advice, and nobody has any, apparently, for what to do during these little stroke things (if that's what they are). They talk about aspirin or warfarin for prevention, but nothing for during and after. I decided I have to become more proactive again about talking with her and doing things with her -- I've been sort of passive this last month, I think because I'm just generally tired from driving to San Francisco and back twice a week. (which also means I've been eating badly: I always overeat when I'm tired: and I've regained, I think, the four or five pounds I'd lost. And my new blood pressure medicine that doesn't make me cough also doesn't keep my blood pressure down, which will be addressed in a couple of weeks)

On the other hand, things are better in San Francisco. My father has had his first week of radiation therapy, and while he's not bouncy, he's not exactly wasted. Frank has been making him tiny meals many times a day and he's eating better. Moher is walking without a cane and taking charge again (she's the take-charge kind of person. She had started to insist on being in the know a week or more ago, and that was definitely a milestone).

Okay. personheadhttp://hrj.livejournal.com/ tagged me for one of these silly list things that I've come to the point of maybe resisting. It's the only time I've ever been tagged for anything, so it would be discourteous for me to refuse, or to refuse to tag somebody. But before I do that, can I register my disappointment that a word I hate has been adopted by the world online?

Goodness knows I'm not opposed to neologisms. I'm no kind of purist about neologisms, either -- when I see a painful hybrid of Greek and Latin and Germanic roots I think it's funny, not sacreligious. But sometimes a word comes along and a person just can't abide it for their own reasons. I hate hate hate the word "meme" for two reasons: 1)it originates in a stupid fashionable misunderstanding of the way genetics and evolution work and 2)it has unpleasant connections for me because it first spread in usenet by people I don't like. Lots of people I do like participated in this spreading too, so if you can recall being one of the first people to spread this word and the unfortunate stupid idea that clings to it like a mind-numbing stumbling block to comprehension, don't worry -- if you're reading this and you're one of those first people, you're probably not one of the people I don't like, though you probably know who I'm talking about. (probably better than I do because I have not had anything to do with them for a while)

Okay, the silly list thing goes like this: you list five guilty pleasures and then tag five people.

My silly list of five guilty pleasures:
1. fried fish sandwiches in a fast food restaurant
2. salty Japanese snacks
3. dumber and dumber and dumber romantic comedies with fakey cryey spots ("In her Shoes," "Just Like Heaven")
4. mint chocolate ice cream
5. amateur online gay coming of age erotic romance serials. Which I feel less guilt about as the genre develops and I realize I'm watching a new form of literature evolve, and I'm also watching a very interesting phenomenon develop in the interactive community of readers and writers involved with them, and I think I may be able to produce a stuffy analysis of it all, if I can remember how academic writing is supposed to go.

Okay, I'll tag, um, del_c,mayakda,orangemike,brooksmoses, and aynathie.

On another front, I have finally finished transcribing Chapter 21 of The Donor and will upload it sometime after I tour the water treatment plant and look at orchids with the nice fellow. And I wrote six hundred new words in that story about boys who don't: I think I know what it is now: I think it has four sections and they're really quite grown by the third one. Maybe five, depending on how I work out this one thread of the story.

Oh yes: the manzanita in front of Gloria's is in full bloom, and so are my two almond trees, and the apricot tree is in advanced popcorn stage, and the plum tree is in early popcorn stage, and the Belle of Portugal (rosa giganta) is blooming. And the mustard and oxalis are blooming all through the apple orchards on Calabasas Road. No arguing about it: it's springtime.

As I write this, I am forced to listen to the Monterey television news. Would you like to know an absolutely sure sign you're hearing news from a small town? When at the top of the hour the announcer says "And our top story today, the sanctions that will affect every athlete at Salinas High School."

And when they assume that every viewer knows what the CCS is (the Central Coast sports leagues, who manage all the meets and games and playoffs and things for I think most of the middle school and high school team sports), and cares. The story is this: the Salinas football team was very badly behaved for a very long time, including fights and rac.vial epithets at games, and last straw: they appeared, in uniform, at the Salinas High School football field, in a commercial for a mortgage company. So, while the Salinas High School teams are allowed to compete against the other teams in the region, they are not allowed into the playoffs this year, and the football team is not allowed in the playoffs next year.

The newsworthy aspect of all this is that this is the top news story of the local television station. At least I think so. We have strikes and near-strikes, wrangling over land use policy, water use and conservation, logging, gang fights, a scandal of epic proportions at the University of California, and the top story is the sanctions handed out to Salinas High School.
They've repeated all the details of the story five times now, and they're promising more at eleven.

The scandal of epic proportions. I've mentioned this before, right? The last chancellor but one was paid a huge signing bonus, given an amazing moiving allowance and specially-invented highly lucrative jobs for her girlfriend and her girlfriend's son (or was it nephew?), and mortgage payments on an extra house (I believe the one she had lived in before she moved into the University House, which is, as every student knows from the Chancellor's Tea thing they have for new students, amazingly luxurious and beautiful and includes a panoramic view of the Bay) So as the story unfolds it turns out there has been this pattern of overcompensating the top administrators, not just at UCSC but throughout the UC system, while financial aid gets inexorably cut more and more each year, outreach and development programs are cut, fees are raised, and teaching and support staff are cut back. It's of a piece, right, with the overcompensation of upper management in all industries, and the grinding of the workers. Oh, the Regents have called for an investigation, as if they weren't at the core and root of it all in the first place.

More about the University. One of the oddities of the state is that the University is a law to itself, and doesn't have to meet local zoning, planning, land use, building, water or fire protection regulations. This naturally creates some tension as the campus has been growing steadily in the firty years it has been open, and there are inevitable impacts on the community. Lately the University has been a little less cavalier about these things and is attempting to work with the locals, but so far there's not been much confidence generated. The newsy part? The Mayor of Santa Cruz, who is a prominent professor, has called the University's report on its growth plans "a sham." The City is demanding a new environmental impact report, among other things.

One little sensational event was a stabbing on Pacific Avenue -- the main drag, more or less, of town, that is a restaurant and bookstore and nightclub heaven, not the seat of government or bread-and-butter business (though there's some of that, tucked away in upstairs offices). The sensational thing was a van cruised down the street and a bunch of guys with uniformly buzzed skulls leaped out of the van, grabbed a man emerging from the big movie theater, and began beating and stabbing him -- he was apparently not dangerously hurt before they left again. The Downtown Association would like you to know that they still consider the street to be generally safe (I do too, but I thought it was funny that they felt they had to say so).

Other sports news: it's Mavericks season, when the big waves happen and a bunch of top surfers walk around with pagers to let them know when the big waves are right for the surfing contest to happen during which they will be lifted by helicopter out to the beginning of the waves and they ride these huge things (one of four or five biggest surfable waves in the world). But that's all I know this year: there was the obligatory picture of Flea Virostko and some other guy, and the obligatory nod to Mark Foo, who died there a dozen years ago. And our boxing contender, Carina Moreno, is on the front pages too.

Oh, and the county got declared a state of emergency again because of the storms last week. You have to realize that while the county gets that declaration often, it's mostly due to the political and economic savvy of our politicians: what "state of emergency" means is "heavy economic impact from weather or geological events or fire, which is officially recognized and due to which locals can make insurance claims and get government grants." The latest estimate on the storm damage is 2.4 million dollars.

Mushroom hunters found the skeleton of a man. Not us. The man seemed to have wandered off from a group home for the mentally ill and I suppose he died of exposure. The sherriff's deputy who spoke to the paper said "Mushroom hunters find a lot of things for us."

Okay, that's it. There's more stuff about the housing crisis, wild pigs, and the usual Pentecostal minister found guilty of child molestation, but I'm done. There's always more.

. . .

On the personal front: my father does not have sciatica. He has metastisized lung cancer which has invaded his adrenal glands and spine. He's going back on opiates for the pain, and they're designing a radiation and chemotherapy program for him. On a happier note, they've given him an oxygen machine and he's feeling rather spry and perky. My son is spending four days a week in the City, helping my stepmother with her post-stroke physical and speech therapy.
I'm not getting much writing done.

They only work if you read them as well as write in them.

You should preferably read them before you go to bed at night so you don't wake up at nine thirty (having driven to San Francisco and back the night before, again, this time to deposit son for his stint of grandma-spotting*, and then staying up later than that because the coffee you drank to be alert on the drive home worked way too well) and realize your annual mammorgram was supposed to have happened at nine o'clock. Even if the pocket calendar in question is this really nice, beautiful thing supposedly modelled on the one that Van Gogh and Hemmingway used ("moleskine," but it wasn't really expensive, and it was on sale)


*Moher is doing very well. She no longer needs someone inside the bathroom with her, but she needs to be spotted when she walks, and she needs help with her walking brace for daytime and her hand brace for nighttime. And she needs someone to do her physical therapy, language therapy, and occupational therapy with her. And someone needs to pay attention to my father, who is doing better but is still short of breath all the time.

Did I tell you that when I took my dad home from the hospital last week he had two goals he had to attend to immediately -- the last track for his latest compilation CD, and Moher's disability forms?

Meanwhile, Moher naturally wants to run before she can walk.